I've always looked at my role in politics as that of "historian". In fact, the subtitle of my blog "Mugsy's Rap Sheet" is "Recording History for Those Who Seek to Rewrite it." Republicans have more than a bad habit of rewriting and white-washing history. Heck, the man Republicans have elevated to near sainthood... St. Ronnie... bears no resemblance to the man we knew as "Ronald Reagan" (I refer you to the book "Tear Down This Myth" for a detailed comparison.) And you'd THINK that since the invention of videotape, these numbnuts would stop thinking they can just make wild claims about The Bush Legacy without somebody calling them on it.

Back during the 2008 Presidential campaign, I couldn't help but notice how frequently & easily the Republican candidates (including Mitt Romney) would rewrite the history of how we ended up going to war with Iraq in order to paint Bush as less culpable. One of the most disturbing arguments was that we were FORCED to invade Iraq after "Saddam refused to allow the weapons inspectors back in", which I KNEW was a load of... eh, rubbish (this is a family site). So I dug through the BBC News archives and pieced together the following video. It's five years old now, but today on the eve of the third and final Presidential Debate, this time on foreign policy, with a Republican candidate whom has (as Rachel Maddow reminded us Friday) SEVENTEEN of his TWENTY-FOUR Foreign Policy Advisors comming from the Bush Administration, I thought that maybe now was the perfect time to look back for a moment to remember history as it actually happened, and think long & hard about possibly returning these people to the White House just four short years later:

Bush Kicked Out the Weapons Inspectors, Not Saddam(source video is nearly a decade old now, so please excuse the quality.)
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Remember all the people that tried to tell us that George W. Bush was already planning the invasion of Iraq almost from the day he took office (with their eyes set on all that lovely oil)? President Bush's defenders (I call them "apologists", which riles them terribly because they don't think they have anything to apologize for) are quick to try and discredit those who dared say such things, but if you won't take those people's word for it, how about the word of George W. Bush?

Forget "9/11 changed everything", Bush was on the Iraq/WMD warpath from DAY ONE of his Presidential campaign.
[oldembed src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/se2mlKTHdUk" width="420" height="315" resize="1" fid="21"]

And here we are once again, four short years later, flirting with the idea of electing another Republican president that appears to be hot for war in the Middle East, only this time, instead of Iraq, it's Syria and Iran. We've seen this movie before folks, and we already know how it ends.

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